You may have heard at CES last week that Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced our new Ultra HD TV processor. The Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 802 processor is the first commercially announced integrated SoC designed for next-generation 4K and 1080p Smart TVs, set-top boxes and digital media adapters. It’s designed to bring Snapdragon smartphone smarts to the Smart TV space and help enable a whole new level of Ultra HD (4K) Smart TV experiences, including seamless decoding of Ultra HD video content, rich user interfaces and console quality gaming.

The Snapdragon 802 processor is designed to enable advanced Smart TV experiences, and more of them, simultaneously on one TV or on multiple different connected devices. It will be possible for users of Snapdragon 802 powered Smart TVs to play an online game while video conferencing, browse the web while streaming a movie, or play back up to four Full HD videos simultaneously on the same Ultra HD display.

The Snapdragon 802 processor can enable all this because of the power-efficient performance leadership and technical advancements it brings from the smartphone and tablet space and because of new innovations unique to the Smart TV space. Among the many core strengths that the Snapdragon 802 processor brings is a high performance video core, which was first in the mobile industry to deliver hardware HEVC (H.265) decode for extremely low power Ultra HD video playback. Qualcomm Technologies’ own HQV (Hollywood Quality Video) processing engine with high quality directional scaling and resolution enhancement is being used to enable up-scaled 1080p content to a level approaching Ultra HD quality.

Qualcomm Technologies’ unique heterogeneous compute architecture also helps the Snapdragon 802 processor achieve its superior performance and power efficiency by using just the right combination of processing components for a given task, whether it be the quad-core Krait 400 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU or Hexagon DSP. The integrated Snapdragon StudioAccess™ content protection engine helps allow premium content to be enjoyed securely on the main TV or to be served to connected mobile devices.

Qualcomm Technologies custom-built a software framework for the Snapdragon 802 processor that is designed to provide fully enabled Android TV capability for Smart TVs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes and digital media adapters. The framework supports analog and digital broadcasts, as well as various TV inputs. (The Snapdragon 802 processor will support Android KitKat.)

Add industry-leading connectivity to all this and you have the recipe for a truly Smart TV. Our state-of-the-art 2-stream, dual-band 802.11ac enables ultra-high Wi-Fi capacity (up to 667 Max PHY rate), enabling seamless streaming and fast, power efficient transmission of large files. Dual-band (5GHz) support enables smooth, uninterrupted HD video transmissions and other latency-sensitive content. And Qualcomm Technologies’ AllJoyn peer-to-peer framework is designed to enable interoperability among connected products and multiscreen software applications, including multiplayer gaming, social media sharing and multiuser productivity tools shared across devices.

The Snapdragon 802 processor will begin sampling within the first half of this year and is expected to be in commercial devices by late 2014. So check back with us on Snapdragon.com for updates on which new smart TVs are the smarter ones, powered by the Snapdragon 802 Ultra HD TV processor.